


a day to remember a day

by isaksara (syailendra)



Series: Atsumu + Sakusa + The National = ? [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, Yes. Comfort No Hurt.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syailendra/pseuds/isaksara
Summary: Atsumu feels satisfaction down to the marrows of his bones—the monsters are gone, but he still knows exactly just how much he pisses Kiyoomi off, even when he’s chewing his rice contemplatively, saying nothing.SakuAtsu Week Day 1:Lay me on the table, put flowers in my mouth, and we can say that we invented a summer lovin’ torture party.(Lemonworld)
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi, background OsaSuna
Series: Atsumu + Sakusa + The National = ? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691503
Comments: 20
Kudos: 311
Collections: SakuAtsu Week 2020





	a day to remember a day

**Author's Note:**

> title and prompt are from Lemonworld by the National! Which is the song that goes with this, vibe-wise. Uh. Something-wise, at least.
> 
> andddd day 1 here we gooOOO

_Lay me on the table, put flowers in my mouth, and we can say that we invented a summer lovin’ torture party._

* * *

Canceling the end of the world doesn’t leave anyone unsentimental, which means nobody gets to be cool for a while. This is fine for Atsumu. If he has to wake up and think of Sakusa Kiyoomi’s half-open mouth as he sleeps as the most beautiful thing in the world it might as well be at a time when everyone else is having equally stupid thoughts. He senses exactly when Kiyoomi stirs, feels the ghost drift alert him to the way the haze lifts from Kiyoomi’s consciousness. His eyelids scrunch together. It’s the dumbest thing in the history of time but the corners of Atsumu’s eyes burn a little bit, watching him rouse.

“Morning,” he says, as Kiyoomi blinks and yawns.

There’s about thirty centimeters of space between them. Atsumu estimated, earlier. He puts his hand about the fifteen-centimeter mark and watches Kiyoomi watch the movement. One day Kiyoomi might imitate the gesture. Or he may never do so. At this point Atsumu doesn’t mind either way as long as Kiyoomi knows the option’s there.

“Good morning.”

They brush their teeth next to each other. Kiyoomi showers first. With his pruney post-shower fingers Atsumu buttons up Kiyoomi’s shirt, taking a little too long to fix the collar because he catches himself staring at the hollow of Kiyoomi’s throat. His still-damp hair gets a few droplets of water on his shoulders, turning little circles of fabric translucent. Atsumu looks up. It’s a good day to be alive and stare at Kiyoomi’s face.

“Omi-omi, you’re so pretty today.”

“I look the exact same as I did yesterday.”

He is, of course, lying. Yesterday Atsumu had seen him wild-eyed, hair plastered all over his face, as Atsumu blinked back to life in the pod Kiyoomi had so hastily opened. Yesterday, he had floated in the middle of the ocean with his forehead pressed against Kiyoomi’s visor so he was looking directly at the blood trickling from the cut splitting Kiyoomi’s bottom lip. This morning, with the exhaustion finally lifted from him, he looks like the start of a new world.

He high-fives ten people on the way to the breakfast hall; Kiyoomi nods at them. Applause rings out and Atsumu bows as Kiyoomi fidgets uncomfortably. No doubt this is nothing compared to what Tobio and Shouyou will be getting as soon as Shirabu releases them from the depths of the medical ward. 

Atsumu wants to be there to give his standing ovation, too, which means waking up early every day so he can catch them have breakfast when they’re finally allowed out. Osamu seems to have the same idea, because he’s already feeding a piece of fish to Suna at seven-thirty a.m. Atsumu tugs on Kiyoomi’s sleeve to drag him over to that table.

“Goooood morning, ‘Samu! What’s for breakfast?”

Osamu gives him a flat look. “Why don’t you go check out the buffet and find out?”

Suna salutes them lazily. Atsumu does check out the buffet and proceeds to have the best breakfast of his life: rice, fish, miso soup, mochi with ground peanuts. He steals one mochi from Kiyoomi’s plate. Annoyance flares, a bright pinprick just behind the surface of Atsumu’s forehead. Kiyoomi shows no reaction. Atsumu feels satisfaction down to the marrows of his bones—the monsters are gone, but he still knows exactly just how much he pisses Kiyoomi off, even when he’s chewing his rice contemplatively, saying nothing.

It had been the other way around at first. They’d finished their first simulation run, and Kiyoomi had taken off his suit methodically, then headed for Komori, who had been holding out a water bottle. Atsumu kept on flashing back to the numbers Suna had been yelling out. 

There was a cloud of heat in his throat, stuffing his ears and steaming the inside of his skull. Sakusa Kiyoomi had initiated a neural handshake perfectly with him. He had known it would happen the moment the man matched him blow for blow on the training mat. Yet Atsumu had hoped, against humanity’s chances of continued survival, that the Tokyo Shatterdome’s newest wonderkid would fall apart when they drifted.

No such luck.

Kiyoomi had turned then, as the heat in Atsumu’s head reached its boiling point, looking directly at him.

“You hate me,” he’d said, like he was voicing out the readings on a diagnostic screen. Then, in much the same fashion, as if he was trying to pinpoint the source of an outlier and stamp it out: “What did I ever do to you?”

Atsumu said nothing, turning quickly away. Up above, on the balcony, Osamu was looking down. He frowned. Suna’s hand was firm around his hip, as though Osamu hadn’t gotten used to his walking aids within the first day of getting them.

“Is it because I’m not your brother? This is an incredibly small and stupid reason. We have bigger things to do.”

Atsumu had lunged at him.

Later, as Kita had sighed, holding a cold pack to Atsumu’s rapidly purpling cheek, Atsumu could still feel the haze inside of him undulate and shift. Confusion. Amusement. Little sparks of irritation that Atsumu wanted to set on fire until they had an inferno of a neural bond; until Kiyoomi hated him back just as much, and they short circuited every jaeger they tried to pilot.

By the time Atsumu was the one yelling at the medics to make sure they handled Kiyoomi right, telling them to take care to keep everything more than sterile, to not touch him with bare hands—by the time he’d snarled, teeth bared, at a medic who so much as insinuated that Kiyoomi was being _unreasonable_ after he’d gone out day after day to risk his life fighting gods with a man who’d tried to rub salt on every single one of Kiyoomi’s wounds the drift couldn’t help but expose—Atsumu could only be glad that Osamu had ended up safely tucked away in the belly of the Shatterdome, cooking dinner like he used to love to do.

The car he’d asked for is already there at the dome’s parking lot when Atsumu manages to tug Kiyoomi by the sleeve there. It’s not an overly nice car by any means—it’s a Toyota, and Atsumu doubts it’ll impress any in-laws (if Kiyoomi’s parents still care about that) but it’ll get the job done. Atsumu opens the passenger door, and Kiyoomi just slides in. There’s warmth suffusing in his chest. Kiyoomi looks up at him questioningly.

"Where are we going, Atsumu?"

“You'll find out,” Atsumu says.

He drives. Kiyoomi connects his phone to the Bluetooth system and blares slow, pensive music, matching the rhythm of the world rolling past them. The gentle heat keeps bubbling, spilling over in his chest, prompting Kiyoomi to glance at him periodically. There’s some concern there, but it’s general, born from Kiyoomi’s habit of scanning Atsumu’s baseline vitals to compare them against his mental records.

Every time the suits come off, Kiyoomi checks up on him. Atsumu had finished a run gasping once, still feeling the way kaiju flesh had given under a blade, the image of a jaeger being crushed between ivory claws fresh in his brain. A pilot had lost her partner that night— not in the way Atsumu had lost Osamu. They’d docked. Stumbling out, Atsumu felt the overwhelming urge to feel the physical dimension of Kiyoomi’s presence, even though his consciousness was buzzing just between the threads of Atsumu’s. Monitoring. Comparing his findings to his records of Atsumu’s brainwaves.

“You… want to touch me?” he’d asked in the hallway as they walked to their quarters. Panic flared in Atsumu’s chest, the fear of what came with everything touch was. Precisely the physical dimension of it.

The spiral continued. Atsumu was choking on two separate worsening breakdowns at once. “No,” he lied. “Go ahead an’ sleep, Omi-kun.”

Kiyoomi was right there, alive and breathing. The man who knew Atsumu was still here to know him. The hallway was quiet but the ringing of alarm bells didn’t stop. If there was anything Atsumu learned from being on the front line of a crisis, it was that your brain listened to very little reason.

“There’s clothes,” Kiyoomi said finally. “You can touch me where I have clothes on.”

“Okay. Okay.”

In Kiyoomi’s bed, Atsumu pressed a kiss to the fabric between his shoulderblades, then moved on to each shoulder, to the solid expanse of his back. Still here. He kissed the part of Kiyoomi’s chest just below the neckline of his nightshirt. Still here. Kiyoomi had brushed his hand over the jutting line of Atsumu’s spine, just over his T-shirt, and the resulting shiver was an earthquake inside their heads. Still here.

Still here, now, scrolling through his playlists to switch to a song by a band whose members had all died in the first attack.

Atsumu parks at their destination. There’s a part of Shibuya that slopes upwards a little bit, so you can see the telephone poles stick up over roads, and some of Tokyo just below. He never lived in Tokyo—not until the Shatterdome, at least—but there is a pull just like nostalgia in his chest anyway when he looks at the sprawl of rectangular roofs with leaves growing all over, the faded signs hanging on the sides of buildings, the exposed skeletons of skyscrapers ravaged by kaiju. Empty cars, abandoned forever, dot the greenish-gray valley with color. The sky is so blue.

Atsumu exits the car and sits on its hood to breathe in the afternoon air. He glances through the windshield—Kiyoomi is sitting with fists curled on top of his thighs, looking far too large for his seat, his blank stare directed upwards. Up at the house he used to live in, now overrun by creeping vines and wildflowers.

The tears come hot and hard and fast. Atsumu doubles over, sobbing his lungs out, gasping in breaths that tear through his throat like the winds of a hurricane. Atsumu lets the foreign grief run through him—for the gates he’s never walked through, a street he never knew. It isn’t like Kiyoomi spent much time playing in this neighborhood. Still, Kiyoomi sees the yellow petals swaying outside his bedroom window and thinks: that wasn’t there, before.

The passenger door opens. There’s a weight being pressed to his side. He can feel the heat of Kiyoomi’s arm through the fabric of his shirt as breathing becomes easier, prompting the flood of tears to fade into trickling at the corners of his eyes.

“Thank you,” Kiyoomi murmurs against the side of Atsumu’s forehead. Atsumu feels alarm race just under the surface of his skin. The hairs on his arm stand on end.

“Hey, no problem.”

Very close to the horizon, you can see the mirror-like line of the sea—the former gateway to hell. Now it seems almost docile, with the bright noon sun throwing glimmers of light over its surface. Hard to imagine great hulking monsters rising up out of it to reduce buildings to rubble. That’s what being human is about, isn’t it? Taking the things you fear and beating the horror out of them. As though to punctuate this thought, Atsumu feels fingers intertwine with his, a chin resting on his shoulder. He doesn’t dare move.

Atsumu whistles, a low tone that swoops high like a seabird skimming the water before heading for the clouds. “Lookit that. It’s the world we saved.”

The warmth all over him is foreign at first and has nothing to do with the sun. By the time he feels it, its origin no longer matters. 

The Earth continues to turn.

**Author's Note:**

> edit: yes, Atsumu's previous partner was Osamu until an Incident made it impossible for Osamu to pilot.


End file.
